A silly question?

[Suff]

Well it's certainly confusing if you don't have the grounding.

Back in the mid 90's I gave my father a computer and spent time teaching him how to use it. Being an ex Air Force electrician, he attended all these lessons with his notebook and pen. He still does. But many of my lessons were in DOS and Windows3.0 which was a very different animal to what we use today.

Now my father tends to call me for advice on options and to discuss what he thinks is going on when he can't quite work it out.

The last time my father rebuilt the desktop, we discussed what he needed for a few months, created a shopping list and he bought the parts. I gave him a CD and a key and off he went. Before he began my mother said "Do you think he can do this?" Mainly because my Brother is so negative about him. I said "Yes of course he's more than capable and we've discussed everything he needs to do".

I asked my mother, later, how it had gone. She said "it was the easiest upgrade yet".

When my Brother donated some hardware for my Father to upgrade again, it was not such a smooth upgrade. Mainly because my Brother kept trying to force my father to do what my Brother wanted.

My father has replaced the processor in his old Laptop, then he upgraded the memory, then I bought him a SSD drive and a replacement tray for his DVD player, for the old laptop and we imaged his hard drive to the SSD and put his old hard drive in the tray. I also gave him my old USB DVD Drive. After that was done it extended his Laptop life for another 3 years.

I tend to discuss with my Father what he needs to do and then send him links to video's of what to do. He watches the Video's and does the work.

Then again, my Father has a desktop, 2 laptops and a netbook so if something goes wrong he will not be stuck....

My father is now 79.

One of the best things I did for him early on was to buy him a years subscription to Personal Computer World. He found the information in them very useful and kept articles he though would need. I did the same in the early 90's but the Internet took over as an information source.

Stick with it, it does get easier.

[Aggers]

Thanks, Suff.

I'd be alright if I had a son like you.

[Suff]

You are welcome as always.

Well a son as I am now. 30 years ago? Different issue I would not want a son as I was then and I have 3....

It does help to have someone close to ask things about. But the advice might not always be what is thought to be wanted. I've just been through a long discussion phase with my Brother over the Raspberry Pi. He can't see past the fact that he thinks I should spend the next 6 months spending all my free time buying bits of hardware to solder together and plug into it and then writing programs to run that hardware.

All I want, right now, is two (or more), media centres on which I can have more control than one I bought in the shops and also the ability to switch some power on and off. For which I will do some soldering and writing programs for as it will be £16 for the kit against about £300 if I have to buy a complete consumer hardware set to do the whole power switching thing.

I do hope the frustrations decrease. I know I've managed to get my father to the point where he is comfortable. My parents go to a lot of foreign places on holiday, take a lot of video and pictures and my mother does talks to the U3A based on powerpoint presentations. My mother writes the slides and my father takes the pictures and digital video's and embeds them into powerpoint.

It's quite funny really as my mother says "He (my father), may know more about the hardware and Windows, but I know more about the software. I'm just not interested". Nor surprising really as my father was an aircraft electrician but my mother was a radar tech.

At least you don't have a flashing keyboard. I managed to spill coffee on the edge of my Alienware keyboard. My keyboard has lighting zones all over it and I killed the special function key zones with the coffee. However I was doing something important at the time and could not stop. So the coffee got further into the system than I liked. I washed it out eventually but had to unplug the LED wire from the special key pad. Yet it is still very unstable....

The life of a computer user.... Keep the coffee away!!